LIFT is our free live training event on December 6-8 in San Diego, and you’re invited! Tickets are only available until November 20th, so reserve yours now.

Learning management systems (LMS) have a big job. Not only do they need to house your course work, they should help you market and sell your course as well. Thinkific strives to do just that. After trialing a number of online course platforms, I found Thinkific to be a stout platform that can be just the right fit for many course builders’ needs. Overview of Thinkific Thinkific is an all-in-one learning management system that promises …

Course creation is tough work. You spend hours pulling all your hard-earned knowledge out of your head and into a course format that you hope will make sense to your students. You don’t want to struggle with learning a new platform in which to place your fabulous course. I’ve spent a little time playing in some learning management systems (or LMS) to give you a better feel for what is out there and help you …

Confession : When I signed up for the Ruzuku 30-Day Course Creation Challenge in April, 2015, I failed. Ruzuku’s tagline is “Ridiculously Easy Online Course Creation.” So, how could I fail? It wasn’t because I couldn’t finish in time or because I couldn’t figure out how to use the platform to create my online course. It was because I didn’t even try. I was still dreaming about what I wanted my business to be, and …

Higher education has hardly evolved in the past few years. There are still giant auditoriums where professors listen to themselves speak for 3 hours. There are still instructors who read from the book and quietly mumble “Any questions?” before quickly moving on. There are still educators who blame the student if they’re failing. It sucks for students. It sucks for the professors. It sucks for everybody. And the worst part is: this mediocrity is …

So you’re planning to create an online course. That’s awesome! Quick question: Are you going to use a WordPress LMS (Learning Management System) plugin for that? Which one? You might want to try a WordPress LMS plugin if you want to keep your online course completely under your own control, by hosting it on your website and not on a big multi-course marketplace or a third party hosted LMS service. Plugins are one of the …

While we don’t recommend online learning marketplaces as a long-term platform for independent online course creators (here’s why), they are a good way to get your feet wet. There’s very little technical knowledge required, so if that’s the only thing standing between you and your first online course, then a learning marketplace may be the solution for you. The other advantage is that there’s no cost for you to use these platforms. The only cost …

Nothing dampens an online course creator’s enthusiasm like problems with collecting payments. You spend weeks working with your students, answering their emails and solving their problems, doing your best to help them find success. They’re engaged and eager to learn, and you think to yourself “Wow, I’m really making a difference in this person’s life.” But when the time for payment comes, you are met with declines, delays, and plenty of excuses to go around. …

We just reopened the doors to our flagship program, the Course Builder’s Laboratory! This version has been updated, revised, and improved. It’s better than ever! Wanna see inside? Here’s an overview of the entire course: You can take a sneak peek at the syllabus here. Also, thousands of students have taken the Course Builder’s Laboratory since we first offered it several years ago. Meet some of our students on this page. Do you have any …

The State of Online Courses 2017 We surveyed 830 online entrepreneurs about their interest and experience in building online courses. This report summarizes our findings: The Truth About What It Takes to Build a Successful Online Business If you’ve been struggling to build a successful online business—despite following the blueprints of various gurus, then this might explain why: The Teach and Grow Rich Opportunity: In a Nutshell What is the “Teach and Grow Rich” opportunity? …

“Either I’m going to kill myself, or I’m going to make this into a game.” That’s what professional game designer, speaker, and author of Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, Jane McGonigal, thought about her slow and painful recovery from concussion. She found a way to make even that dreary process more engaging and motivating by applying the gamification principles she uses at work. If games …